A bombshell interview with acclaimed Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza shows why you can’t trust almost any reporting on Hamas, Israel’s war in Gaza, or the basic facts of life under the terror group. 

Azaiza has been feted by topline news outlets from CNN to CBS to The Guardian, named GQ’s 2023 Middle East Man of the Year, and cheered by the likes of YouTube sensation Ms. Rachel, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

But in an hours-long taped interview, he’s now opted to tell truths he’d been hiding.

He admits that he suppressed videos of Palestinian war crimes against Israeli hostages: During Hamas’ triumphal march of its kidnapees, “people got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed. But I did not publish those videos.” 

He met with then-Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh but asked that all evidence of it be deleted.

More, he confirms that a Hamas-aligned groupchat more or less gives marching orders to every journalist in Gaza  — who obey, or else.

Hardly far-fetched: al-Jazeera (no friend of Israel) reportedly fired two dozen of its own “journalists” over alleged ties to Hamas and rival Islamist terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

Above all, Azaiza admits the rigid censorship of all speech and images coming out of Gaza.

“When I was filming and documenting the events, I wasn’t focused on how angry people were toward Hamas and its government,” he pleads.

“When someone gets out of the ambulance and says ‘May God punish Hamas’ while I’m filming, the people around him turn the camera away”; if what someone says to the press “does not align” with Hamas, the speaker will “disappear behind the sun.”

Indeed, Uday al-Ruba’i “was killed during the war by Hamas simply because of opinion on Facebook.” 

Azaiza even asks: “So how many were killed in Gaza by Hamas? And why don’t we hear their names in the West Bank? Not even from Fatah. They were Fatah’s own sons. Thrown off the rooftops. And nobody moved.”

He also blows up the lie of an “Israeli siege” of Gaza pre-Oct. 7, noting: “The last two years, it wasn’t really a siege. Something eased. . . . The country’s standard improved. A lot of new projects opened. Travel got easier. Instead of paying $1,500 or $2,000 for coordination, you’d pay $200.”

More than a decade ago, former AP reporter and editor Matti Friedman revealed how biased the agency’s Israel coverage was; Hamas’ savage approach to media relations was an open secret to anyone in the global or US press who bothered to look into it.

But they kept pretending that sources like Azaiza were not just credible, but heroic.

They insist Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, when by any definition of the term it has not. Just last week, The New York Times condescendingly reported, “Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7” — and then tried to explain it away as an “editing error.”

This, scant months after Nicolas Kristof’s deranged libel that the IDF used dogs to rape Palestinians — a column relying heavily, it should be noted, on a Hamas-linked NGO.

So expect this interview to fall into a great void in the very circles that had embraced Azaiaza when he was a propagandist-by-proxy. This crowd wants to eat up Hamas’ propaganda — and only grew more eager to disseminate it after Oct. 7, because it doesn’t care about truth or the people of Gaza: It’s all about hating on Israel.